The Problem: Pilotitis
The social sector is rife with pilots.
The phenomenon of organizations in the sector launching pilot projects but then failing to scale them is so common that there is a term for it — Pilotitis.
If you are trying something new, it does make sense to start with a pilot. It's the right thing to do. A pilot provides an opportunity to test out many, if not all, hypotheses in smaller settings. A pilot allows you to confirm whether your actions lead to tangible impact before attempting to scale. So why do so many pilots fail to scale?
I have a hypothesis on why successful pilot projects in the social sector fail to achieve the same results at scale. It's the pilot team! Simply put, the team that made the pilot successful often fails to account for the fact that they won't be around in the same way during the scale up.
Let me explain.
The Pilot Dream Team
It starts with the founder(s) who come up with a brilliant (emphasis mine) solution to a vexing social problem. The founders are usually high agency individuals with elite academic training, which guarantees two things – they are excellent at absorbing copious amounts of diverse information, and they are trained in being world-class hoop jumpers, as William Deresiewicz explains in this essay.
Their ability to absorb vast documentation quickly makes them seem deeply knowledgeable in record time. Add in conversations with relevant experts, some field experience, and you have a winning combination. I admire this approach. The hoop jumping skills come in handy to apply and position themselves to win funding for a pilot.
Then comes the founding team. Again, high-agency individuals, very often local, join the team.
Culture, Communication, and Coffee
Even if not from the similar elite colleges or countries, they are often similarly elite – and culturally western in orientation and tastes. To share a personal anecdote on cultural differences — when I joined the social sector, the only type of coffee I knew was instant, served with milk, and my preference was that it was served strong and piping hot. The first time I was part of an international team in the sector, I was introduced to the idea of frequent meetings in coffee shops with unpronounceable selections of coffees that cost a fortune. This might be a small issue to many, but it took me a while to get comfortable in such spaces, the taste of the coffee, the looks I got when I asked for sugar or requested it extra hot, and with the expense. Cultural similarities matter because you communicate more seamlessly. You understand each other much better. During a pilot when there are so many moving pieces and limited time, you can't waste time explaining every little detail.
The Effort Equation
Lastly, the founders and the founding team put in a substantial amount of effort. You do not get to an elite college or become a world-class hoop-jumper without the ability to slog hard, for hours, days, and months at a time. This quality is especially handy when you are part of a team that is out to prove a new innovative solution that solves a social problem with the potential to change the world. The sheer output of such teams is awe-inspiring. Again, this is something I admire.
What do you get when you put together a bunch of ambitious, skilled, and highly motivated individuals — who communicate effectively, and aren't afraid to put in the hours? Well, you get a triumphant pilot.
The pilot team might even feel like Margaret Mead had them in her mind, when she said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has."
Moreover, once the pilot is successful, there is no better team to jump through whatever hoops exist to get the funding to scale. But here things start to unravel.
The Real Reason Pilots Don't Scale
Given the constraints of social sector work, the next group of hires is usually substantially different from the founding team, not only in terms of academic qualifications but also in terms of ambition, effort, and motivations. Very often, these people might be similar to the founding team members in terms of countries of origin but culturally are disparate. These differences seep into communication. Things just don't flow and translate as well as they did when the founding team was the majority. And lastly, the new hires just don't want to work as much as the founding team did.
Often, organizations can stay afloat as long as the founders remain committed to fundraising, not necessarily to the cause! But as results at scale disappoint, founders and founding teams tend to lose interest, and the real potential is never achieved.
It’s easy to blame systems, structures, or funding for why scale doesn’t deliver — but we rarely acknowledge that the very thing that made the pilot succeed was the intense, unsustainable, and elite-driven magic of the pilot team itself. If we want to build for scale, we have to design beyond our own brilliance.
Designing beyond Brilliance
Literature on how to design for scale in the social sector is already available. My two cents: the founding team should explicitly test models where the pilot implementers closely resemble those at scale. Put another way: can the model deliver impact without the pilot dream team?